Arts

ARTS The Case for Charlotte Music, Post-COVID

Just as Charlotte began to lay a foundation for something it’s notoriously lacked over the years—the ability to sustain a vibrant, distinctive local music scene—the pandemic snatched it away, as it did so much else. Was it a lethal blow? This magazine’s longtime editor, now a driver of a local music initiative, grabs the mic to argue: Hell, no

BY RICK THURMOND | PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANIEL COSTON

THE YEAR 2020 was shaping up to be a good one for the Charlotte music scene.

Going into March, independent venues The Evening Muse and Neighborhood Theatre in NoDa had celebrated a run of sold-out shows. Uptown, the brandnew jazz club Middle C had hit its stride with its own string of sellouts. Charlotte’s largest venues, including four Live Nation-owned stages and the city-owned Bojangles Coliseum, Ovens Auditorium, and Spectrum Center were booking more shows than ever.

Any night of the week, you could experience high-quality, local, live music. Heck, pick a night, and you could hear live jazz, which, until the Bechtler started a monthly series 11 years ago, was kept on life support by the legendary Bill Hanna, who died in January. Once a month, at cozy Snug Harbor in Plaza Midwood, Elevator Jay, the bard of Beatties Ford, presided over Player Made, an Ode to Southern Rap. At Comet Grill in Dilworth, some of the city’s best bar bands lit up the place three or four nights a week. On Sunday a ernoons, local and touring bands contorted themselves into a corner at iconic dive bar Thirsty Beaver and played for hours.

Recording studios were booked with sessions. Local artists in all genres worked on new material. Backup players joined big names on cross-country tours. Charlotte’s own Jonathan Kirk, better known as DaBaby, was on his way to a second straight Billboard No. 1 record.

For me, more than two years of work was starting to pay off. In late 2017, through my role at Charlotte Center City Partners, I helped launch an initiative called Music Everywhere CLT. Our longterm goal, building on a latent strength of Charlotte, is for music to become an essential element of this city. Through research, focus groups, a survey of 2,000 people, and work with a consultant, we produced something called The Charlotte Music Ecosystem Study and Action Plan. Nerdy, I know. Town halls and meetups followed. We have strategies to boost audience awareness, grow artist resources, develop the industry, ensure equitable outcomes, and organize the music community. All of that is the foundation. Atop it, a killer music scene can ourish.

At 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 12, I was scheduled to meet with a few folks in the music community at The Evening Muse. We were planning the rst-ever Charlotte Music Week, a followup to Confluence, a music conference and festival that debuted at the U.S. National Whitewater Center in 2019. We were shooting for the week before the Republican National Convention in August. The concept: a conference during the day, with guest speakers from Charlotte and all over the country.

At night, artist showcases in venues all over town. It would be a regional draw, an attempt to establish Charlotte as a Southeastern hub for music.

I never made it to the Muse that a ernoon. My week turned into a dizzying series of meetings with titles like “Public Health Strategy.” On Friday the 13th, I tucked my computer monitor under my arm and walked out of my o ce, not knowing when I would be allowed to return.

FROM 1994 TO 2016, while I worked at this magazine, I wrote or edited tens of thousands of words about the Charlotte music scene. I did it because music matters to me. I can neither play a lick nor sing a note, but some of the most memorable nights of my life have been spent inside local music venues.

I also did it because I think music matters to a city. People want to live in cities with lively cultural scenes. Companies want to be in those cities, so they can hire workers. Music is a growing industry. Every record made or concert produced helps create dozens of jobs. Increasing numbers of visitors want to come to cities with great music scenes, and they spend money when they are in those cities.

At a deeper level, music matters to a community. Music unites and inspires. Lord knows we could use some unity and inspiration.

At its core—and this is why I do the work I do—music is how a place expresses itself. Rock, jazz, blues, country, folk—all are American creations (in fact, all are African American creations), and each has its own vernacular particular to the area from which it emanates. Try to imagine New Orleans without jazz; New York without Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith; California without The Beach Boys. Memphis isn’t Memphis without Stax Records and a horn section. Without hip-hop, Atlanta has no soul. Bluegrass is the soundtrack to Western North Carolina.

Charlotte has long sought not only to de ne itself but to announce itself, and, well, I think that’ll be really hard to do without music.

So when COVID ripped out the city’s vocal cords, you’d have been forgiven for thinking: Game over. Except I’m hopeful. In fact, I’m more than hopeful; I’m optimistic—and you should be, too. The music community took some punches,

(Opposite) The band Akita plays at the Confluence festival and music conference at the U.S. National Whitewater Center in 2019. (Above) Jonathan Wilson of Muscadine shares the Tremont Music Hall stage with Hope Nicholls in 1996. Tremont, which closed in 2015, is one of several Charlotte live music venues the city’s growth has swallowed.

sure, and they hurt like hell. But they weren’t knockout blows. Artists gured out ways to play. Charlotte showed up with nancial and emotional support. Venues banded together.

It will continue to be hard. But Charlotte’s music community was busy building something last March, and we are far from nished.

THROUGHOUT THE 1990s AND 2000s, venues came and went. Bands surfaced, threatened to break through, then faded. The ’90s were promising. Charlotte’s rst alternative-rock radio station, WEND 106.5 The End, promoted local shows and played local bands. A no-nonsense woman named Penny Craver leased an old cinder block building in then-gritty South End and opened Tremont Music Hall. Everyone played there: teenage hardcore bands and early-career Ben Folds and Ryan Adams. Major labels snatched up promising area bands like Muscadine, Jolene, Lustre, and Sugarsmack.

It didn’t last. Radio went corporate. The labels discarded the Charlotte bands, attracted to newer, shinier objects in some other city. The Charlotte music scene seemed doomed to forever stay a stepchild to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill powerhouse and up-and-coming Asheville, occasionally lunging toward a tipping point, then turning back or being turned away before anyone else noticed.

Sure, there were moments. The Avett Brothers, from just up Interstate 85, headline festivals and sell out large venues all over America. Anthony Hamilton and Fantasia Barrino have 29 Grammy nominations between them, and each has won one. But no one followed in the Avetts’ wake. On a 2016 tour, Hamilton and Fantasia sold out Madison Square Garden; the tour’s finale at Bojangles Coliseum was two-thirds full—which seemed to validate the widespread perception that Charlotte’s music scene underwhelms and underachieves.

Five years ago, the situation seemed dire. In 2015, Tremont Music Hall closed and was soon reduced to rubble, torched by the white-hot real estate market of South End. Not long a er, a guy named Nick Karres retired, selling his little bar to ever-expanding Central Piedmont Community College. The Double Door Inn was one of my favorite places on Earth, and I’m far from alone in this sentiment. It was a room that made bad bands sound good, good bands sound great, and great bands transcend space, time, and their own ideas of what was possible.

To this day, what gets me is this: The Double Door slunk away with little outrage from the community, purchased and torn down with your money and mine, tax dollars erecting a four-story CPCC building in place of 40 years of culture. I don’t recall a single nger-wagging op-ed, no political grandstanding. Just a too-late petition, a bittersweet memorabilia sale (I still regret not acting fast enough to claim a row of the church-pew seats that my wife would

have greeted with her lovely, tight smile), and one secret, last-ditch, failed attempt to secure the building, move it up the street, and reopen it as a nonpro t.

That last bit is a story for another day. My point is that it seemed like the Charlotte music scene, such as it was, had reached its nadir.

Yet while myopic, sentimental sops like me bemoaned the loss of surface accoutrements like old rock clubs, Charlotte kept attracting talent. Singers, rappers, songwriters, players, and producers moved to Charlotte for the same reasons everyone else does: relative a ordability, good weather, nice people, accessibility to other places, plentiful jobs. Over the past seven or eight years, the newcomers have turned up the heat underneath the simmering scene.

Leo Solis came here 10 years ago to work as a tour manager. “When I realized how cheap it is to make a record here and how cheap it is to live, it was kind of a no-brainer. I was like, ‘I can work with new artists and work with this crazy, untapped potential in this town known as a banking city? I want to stay here.’” Now, Leo and his wife have an indie-pop band (SOLIS). He started indie label Four Finger Records with Jeremy Smith. He produces. He’s a sound engineer.

Tim Scott Jr. graduated from Northwest School of the Arts in 2006, then attended N.C. Central. Ever since, he’s made music his livelihood. He’s a drummer, a music director, artist manager, and talent buyer, and he hosted the monthly South End Jazz Jam for two years until the shutdown. “Since 2017,” he told me, “I’ve seen a coming together of the music community that I’ve never seen in this city before.”

If music is how a city expresses itself, then Charlotte was starting to nd its voice.

THAT’S WHAT MADE MARCH so di cult.

On Thursday, March 12, a er a show by Eddie Z and the Vault Dwellers, Joe Kuhlmann, co-owner of The Evening Muse, took the sta out for a drink. “I remember telling them, ‘This is going to be strange, but we’ll survive this. We will navigate this and gure it out.’ I remember thinking it was going to be a few months. ‘Like, OK, Memorial Day, we’ll probably reopen.’”

Now, he’s hoping for Memorial Day 2021. Overnight, the Muse went from hosting 45 or 50 shows a month to zero. It was the same all over town. Every venue shut down. Recording studios closed. Events, canceled. Tours, suspended.

“What we do is create music and we release it and we promote and we play it live,” Solis says. “And all of those things went away in a matter of days.” All of his income evaporated overnight. His wife was pregnant with their rst child (they welcomed a baby boy in November), and she worked at a grocery store. They decided she would stay home. Leo found work in the service industry.

A couple of weeks into the pandemic, I helped host a few Zoom roundtables and town halls for the music community. I had this idea to start a microgrant program so musicians could buy livestream

COVID forced local musicians to find new ways to reach audiences. Since March 2020, Josh Daniel has livestreamed hundreds of gigs—most, like this tribute to The Band in November (left), from his home in Plaza Shamrock. (Below) Sam Tayloe (left) and Houston Norris of Time Sawyer during a livestreamed show at The Evening Muse in December.

or in-home recording equipment. “That’s great,” one artist said. “But I need that money to pay the rent.”

Fair point.

We partnered with Tosco Music and FAIR PLAY Music Equity Initiative to start the Charlotte Music Community Relief Fund. Over 10 rounds of grants, we read so many heartbreaking applications. One singer-songwriter with a decent following went from regular gigs to homeless in a matter of months. (He’s back on his feet again.) I can tell you story a er story a er story.

What worries me most are the stories I don’t know. By fall, we had exhausted the fund, $80,000 worth of $500 grants. Not long a er that, the federal unemployment bonus ended, then state unemployment maxed out. So many folks were on the precipice, and $500 goes only so far. I know the money made a difference because I read the thank-you emails. But for how long?